Abstract

ExcerptEconomic planning and control have long been central to China’s political imagination. From debates on “macro-regulation” to visions of a digitally coordinated economy, the conviction that order can and must be designed defines much of the Chinese state’s contemporary self-image. Traditions of intervention reach deep into Chinese political history, yet the modern vocabulary and apparatus of planning—industrial blueprints, commissions, and five-year plans—emerged gradually in the early and mid-twentieth century, amid efforts to modernize the nation and mobilize its resources. In these decades, Chinese technocrats and reformers sought to fuse moral ideas of progress, even breakneck-speed development, with modern instruments of control, which left legacies both on the Chinese Mainland and on Taiwan. Contemporary Chinese faith in planned intervention grew from the contested experiments of that formative era.